Isegoria

Handle discusses the logic of perpetual immigration:

It seems almost Marxist in the ‘self-destructive cycles of Capital seeking foreign markets’ manner.

1. To work hard for meager compensation, someone must be born and raised in circumstances within a hand’s breadth of starvation.
2. But we have made ourselves rich and achieved the goal of ensuring that no one here is raised within a hand’s breadth of starvation.
3. But that means none of our nation’s children will work hard for meager compensation! That work ethic cannot be taught at school, it must be lived in one’s formative years.
4. But there is plenty of that near-starvation abroad, with peasants who were harshly trained by impoverished circumstances to work hard for peanuts.
5. So we will import them here, to make them our Helots.
6. But then their children will grow up in our rich system, beneficiaries of the apparatus that ensures no one will grow up within a hand’s breadth of starvation.
7. So we must go on importing, generation after generation.

Alas, the children of helots, who are not fit for anything other than helot work, when brought up without the requisite hard-life-trained work ethic to conduct that helot work, tend to participate in… less socially optimal behavior patterns. The population fraction consisting of ruined-helots and the magnitude of the challenge of dealing with the resulting consequences, therefore, is destined to increase.

Henry Dampier offers another opinion:

Let me contradict you: it can be taught through special measures. That is what boarding school and expectations of military service can help to inculcate (but not in a guaranteed way). Also the entire older ethic of youth sports was arranged around developing boys into well-rounded men. Today the objective of sports is to provide entertaining inventory to advertise against.

If you raise rich kids as rich kids, you get Rich Kids of Instagram. If you take it seriously, on the other hand, you get a class of people who go conquer more than half of the world’s territory.

Also, even in Stoddard’s day, a horde of workers is not as important as the engineers who develop the machines. A horde of workers is also not very useful if they revolt regularly and you need to hire Pinkertons to spy on them and/or kill them when they become unruly.

It is hard to argue against mass importation of helots in a country founded by heretics, convicts, indentures, and other assorted cast-offs.

Democracy is the key difference here, really. Under an aristocratic system, the superior classes have incentives to improve the long term value of their charges. Because they have at least partial ownership stakes in them and the land that they live upon.

Under democracy, no one really owns anything for very long, so the incentive is to rape as much as you can until you are knocked off your perch. Your property rights themselves are highly perishable, and this is one of the main things de Tocqueville remarked upon — America’s early anti-inheritance laws, which have mutated considerably to perform similar functions today in rather different ways.

Handle suggests that work ethic is context-dependent:

There is no lack of work ethic at reasonable high levels of society, plenty of managers in private firms and even in government are driven and ambitious workaholics, often admirable, but sometimes almost pathological. At the top, the competition is fierce, and the striving for money and status intense.

The problem is at the bottom. Teaching people do be voluntarily willing to work hard for peanuts doing low-skill, mind-numbing, back-breaking manual labor, without any ‘higher’ social purpose than mere economic production of low-status commodities (so, not the military), especially when there’s an alternative path to subsistence available, is something that can’t be don’t through anything less than Orwellian levels of brainwashing.

It requires people being brought up in a desperate situation where they felt the chill on their back of the ever-nearby icy fingers of destitution, watched friends and neighbors occasionally fail, and where there was no other choice but to struggle constantly to survive.